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App Certification Problem

Question

It is the first app I submit to the windows store and I am really confused. My app doesn't use the internet and works completely offline. It failed certification and I had the following note:

The app has declared access to network capabilities and no privacy statement was provided in the Description page.The app has declared access to network capabilities and no privacy statement was provided in the Windows Settings Charm.

How can I declare that my app doesn't access the network to avoid this problem?

If your app connects to a network, you need to publish a privacy policy.

In particular, if you declare any of the following capabilities, you must maintain a privacy policy:

internetClient

internetClientServer

privateNetworkClientServer

This seems reasonable, because most application today want to connect to remote services, but in this case the IP address of the client – which is definitely sensitive data – is sent to the service. So if your app doesn’t connect to the network, you
better turn off this capability to save you some certification time. On the other hand, if your app does nothing else, but downloads data from the Internet, you definitely need a privacy policy.

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I have moved this thread to Tools for Windows Store apps forum for better support.

Thanks,

We are trying to better understand customer views on social support experience, so your participation in this interview project would be greatly appreciated if you have time. Thanks for helping make community forums a great place.
Click
HERE to participate the survey.

If your app connects to a network, you need to publish a privacy policy.

In particular, if you declare any of the following capabilities, you must maintain a privacy policy:

internetClient

internetClientServer

privateNetworkClientServer

This seems reasonable, because most application today want to connect to remote services, but in this case the IP address of the client – which is definitely sensitive data – is sent to the service. So if your app doesn’t connect to the network, you
better turn off this capability to save you some certification time. On the other hand, if your app does nothing else, but downloads data from the Internet, you definitely need a privacy policy.

We are trying to better understand customer views on social support experience, so your participation in this interview project would be greatly appreciated if you have time. Thanks for helping make community forums a great place.
Click
HERE to participate the survey. Thanks<br/> MSDN Community Support<br/> <br/> Please remember to &quot;Mark as Answer&quot; the responses that resolved your issue. It is a common way to recognize those who have helped you, and
makes it easier for other visitors to find the resolution later.

As a note: if you look at that list of things, note that the first one is "IP Address". But every single networking API we have (except for Bluetooth sockets) is an IP (internet protocol) based API -- the datagram sockets, stream sockets, the web sockets,
HTTP, background transfer -- they ALL use IP addressing.

That means that ALL networking requires a privacy policy.

The simplest thing to do is turn off the networking capability. It's on by default. The best thing is to provide a privacy policy yourself. In my case, I made a public blog for my apps, and I post my privacy policies there.